Anamnesis

This is what I love to do. I love to borrow back words the Church has claimed for its own and re-introduce them into a more universal context. Anamnesis is such a word, a wonderful word. In the Church, it’s associated by the act of

remembrance, with the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ. The word comes to us from the Greek, and it can mean as well, the remembering of things from a previous existence. Literally, it means a loss of forgetfulness, and it’s that silken nuance of the phrase that intrigues me. We can easily say that to lose forgetfulness is simply to remember, that it’s nothing more than a question of semantics. This is what fascinates me, though. Remembering becomes a two-step process. First, we have to lose, or release, our forgetfulness. Only then, in step two, will we be able to remember.